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Month: May 2018

Every morning I wake up thinking about revenues and expenses. I fall asleep planning some new hare-brained idea to try out in the business. Betweentimes I grind through piles of high priority tasks.

I started my career wanting to work to earn money to have freedom to party and to do fun things. The odd thing is that to truly earn money you need to give up the day to day focus on money. You need to look at other things or you will fail when you reach artificial summits in the foothills of wealth. Money for me is no longer a means to purchase goods and services for my happiness. Money is now a scoreboard on life’s video game.

I have been financially independent for several years and could stop working to do anything I wish. But what other game could I play?

I am now working and making many other people wealthy – my employees, my clients, and those I mentor. This is a positive side effect, but still just a side effect of my competitive drive to move my company up the grand scoreboard of economics.

There is nothing else in life I do as well as this. My basketball skills are questionable, my writing is passable, but anything having to do with business has been honed through painful fires. Recruiting, negotiating, marketing, sales, operations, the law, programming, training all are world class.

People don’t know you for your inner world. They generally don’t care if you’re a nice guy, or that you have good intentions. They remember you for what you do; if you volunteer for the Red Cross every day they think of you as a charitable person. If you are like Laurel’s dad and will help anyone with anything they ask, they will remember you as a kind person. If you work in writing, you are an author.

In the world of economics, I am surrounded by titans thousands of times larger than I am. I am so small as to be invisible. To others, I am a hundred times larger than they are. I’d like my business to join the titans one day.

Even my business failures are grander than my wins elsewhere. The enemies I made in romance hate me more for what I did in business than in the home.

I had a bad dream last night. I was running one of my company meetings and was running into lots of technical problems. One of my employees got mad and quit in front of everyone and I couldn’t turn the video off or fix the technical issues.

Let me start out by saying that I love America. We have one of the best meritocracies in the world. I am angry though that this is being subverted by our ruling class.

Once there was a time where a hard-working kid could rise from poverty to power. Social mobility is decreasing though due to selfish scum who are putting their own interests ahead of those of the country.

“Special Interests” is a polite term for the ruling selfish scum who have been undermining the ability of fresh faces to rise.

America once led the world in social mobility – it’s how we rose from a small backwater nation of immigrants to the most powerful country on earth. Anyone with the right skills and motivation could build a titanic corporation or become President.

Now Special Interest Scum at every level are undermining the ability of the American entrepreneur to rise. Examples are everywhere:

Large corporations expanding patent law and expiration periods, making it impossible for little guys to compete

The Presidency being handed to friends and relatives (Bush Jr from Bush Sr, Hillary from Bill, Trump from his dad’s wealth)

News organizations purposefully spreading misinformation and outright lies with social engineering. Fox News is by far the worst perpetrator here – We are a country of over 300 million people, but Fox News feeds it’s readers a steady diet of outrage. Go to their homepage now (whenever you read this). You are almost guaranteed to see stories of teachers having sex with students, blacks / hispanics who killed or hurt someone somewhere, some weirdo liberal saying something extreme, lots of one-sided opinion pieces, etc. You can’t help but get angry at someone reading it. More often than not you will be angry at liberals.

Baby boomers that keep voting themselves more entitlements and benefits (Social Security, Medicare, welfare, failed foreign military adventures) that my generation will have to pay for and won’t be able to partake in.

Scumbag rich kids who inherit their parents wealth and use legal means to prevent others from building their own wealth.

Our Founder’s specifically banned a standing army for a reason – it is incredibly expensive, it is incredibly dangerous to it’s own people, and it is tempting to use it just because you have it. Instead we have a massive industrial complex that feeds off government handouts for boondoggles like the F-35, a $43 million gas station in Afghanistan, training troops that have killed Americans in the Middle East, and countless more.

Well organized attacks against revolutionary tech companies, such as Russia’s current persecution of Facebook and Google

Foreign companies stealing US companies IP with impunity (see Google vs China, and the US governments total incompetence)

US companies enforcing ridiculous IP against foreign nations, preventing them from building their own economies.

Foreign nations like Venezuela and Mexico that “nationalized” / stole the massive investments in infrastructure companies like Exxon put into them.

US politicians attempting to legislate morality

We need to return to Milton Friedman and Adam Smith economics and laws. That means we need to join together to crush the current ruling class and it’s scummy special interests that have their foot on the throats of ordinary American workers and the entrepreneurs amongst them.

A huge airliner taking off over the ocean with engines at full throttle. Slowly gaining altitude. I go into a building and come out a minute later and look over and the airliner is now sinking with only it’s nose cone and engine tips poking out above water.

Laurel going into some sort of weird surgery in front of an audience including me. It’s a weird dark room. Doctor asks her medical history and she says she had a half ear growing somewhere. Doc says where. She says somewhere private. He asks where. I get mad and say it doesn’t matter it’s been removed years ago.

Rules: something that happened to us today, 15 minutes to prepare and then present.

Joel’s piece:

I met two old ladies today who have been neighbors and friends for forty years. They sat together laughing and joking and talking like only people who have been friends forever do. I love seeing that – two people who are happy, and there for each other their whole lives through. The event where we met was the Virginia Country Club’s fundraising fashion show for local businesses and the women’s shelter. I attended it with my wife Laurel, and Jeremy, who has been my friend since I was eighteen. Good times and hard moments, joy and rage, wealth and poverty all come and go. Your family and friends are what truly matters.

More strange dreams, this one from last night. I’ve taken a few liberties to expand it from the original version.

A titanic interstellar cargo ship flew through the darkness of space for millennia at sub-light speed. The internal sensors pinged solar systems and scanned planets as it passed, searching for signs of life. Then it detected a G-type star surrounded by eight planets and an asteroid belt. The life sensors returned true for the first time since the spaceship was launched.

The spaceship adjusted course towards the small blue and green world. It activated its cloaking devices, rendering it nearly invisible across the electromagnetic spectrum. Neither visible light, nor radio waves, nor microwaves were emitted or returned. The ship eased towards its newly determined final destination in silence.

It was a cool autumn day in Australia, and a warm spring day in America when the ancient cargo ship arrived in orbit. Every 92 minutes it circled the planet. The full array of sensory equipment was online scanning the planet in depth, tracking everything from the subtle shifts in the iron core of the planet to every species and variation of plant and animal life across the land and water. Results were fed to the recently awakened supercomputer on board. The computer processed the results, then began tailoring its payload to accomplish its mission.

Three days after arrival, the cargo ship’s payload was ready. The ship began dispersal across the planet. Thousands of small vessels emerged from the five hundred meter long mother-ship. Each flew down through the atmosphere and sprayed needles containing a deadly virus down onto key populations. Once the vessels used up their needle supplies, they were discarded to crash with their fuel fully expended.

The virus was a retrovirus specially targeted towards each of the major species on the planet. It used its organic machinery to seize control of the host’s DNA and change it for its own purposes. The most common large living organisms by biomass were targeted: fish, cattle, sheep, blue whales, and humans.

The infection would enter a victim’s bloodstream, at first through the needles launched from the thousands of planetary vessels, then from other hosts. The virus would capture the white immune blood cells of the body, then red blood cells and turn them to mass producing more of the virus. When the virus penetrated the blood-brain barrier of a victim, the virus would seize control of the front lobes and command the host to attack its own species in order to spread the virus further. At this stage, the virus only had very weak control and only a tenth of the intelligence of the original animal. The result was zombies.

The Five Rivers Cattle Feeding was one of the first targets. With over a million head of cattle, it provided the virus with a billion pounds of the blood and meat and brains it needed. Thousands of cows were infected and began to maul cows around them with kicks and bites. In their mad drive to attack more uninfected cattle, stampedes were created larger than any seen in America since the buffalo were wiped out. The shocked and horrified ranchers died by the dozen, not from the virus but just from getting crushed under the hooves of rampaging beasts.

Manila was ground zero for the human plague. As the most densely populated human city, it fell in less than six hours. The zombies were idiotic, but with extremely active hordes roaming everywhere from the sewers to the skyscrapers, survivors didn’t have a chance.

The uncoordinated masses of human zombies spread out through the countrysides surrounding major cities. In America, farmers, rednecks, and preppers were ready and heavily armed. The human zombies acted with little intelligence and were easy to slaughter, though the sheer numbers still led to further spreading. The acting President Betsy Davos (former Secretary of Education) was finally after three days of bloodshed able to stop the spread by ordering America’s nuclear arsenals to be used on it’s own major cities. The surviving uninfected humans banded together in massive militias that were able to exterminate most of the infected by the end of the week.

Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and other countries nearby didn’t have the nuclear capabilities but used their heavily armed populations to fight back. Israel nuked Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, then used the rest of its arsenal creating a glass border around it. At the end of ten days, the Middle East had returned to a temporary peace.

Countries with huge populations, and little access to guns or heavy weapons in Asia and Africa were less fortunate. The few survivors were in very isolated places.

The day the plague hit, eight billion people lived on Earth. Ten days later, one hundred million uninfected remained. Two billion infected were cut in half to one billion in another two days. Humanity thought it had somewhat gained a grip on the situation.

Over these twenty days, the virus was actively rebuilding its hosts brains from the one tenth intelligence levels back up to close to what they were prior to the attack. The virus’s control of each victim ramped up significantly as well.

Then the virus’s true goal emerged. Every host had been growing a crude organic shortwave radio connected to their brains. These radios allowed hosts to communicate through what seemed like ESP; visual and audio and data streams could pass between nearby hosts. The data streams linked across species – cows, sheep, whales, fish, and people all joined together into super-organisms.

These super-organisms were mostly far apart and didn’t coordinate well internally. However, India with its vast populations of infected individuals and cattle provided billions of linked individuals in a vast neural network.

By the twenty-first day, the India super-organism was self aware and began organizing itself to take advantage of human digital technology in place. Twenty-five days in the India super-organism was dozens of times more intelligent than an uninfected human. Thirty days in the India super-organism enslaved the rest of the smaller infected patches of cattle, sheep, people, fish and whales to itself.

The hundred million uninfected human survivors made contact with the India super-organism and reached an uneasy peace accord with it. Uneasy because the India super-organism’s ambassadors were horrifying Frankenstein monsters with digital devices growing out of their spinal cords and heads, and that spoke every survivors language with flawless grace.

The survivors banded together and watched as the alien India super-organism turned its attention to bigger things. Every plane and satellite that approached its territory was shot down. In only ten days more, a twenty foot tall wall thousands of times longer than the Great Wall of China ringed India. No survivors knew what was happening behind it.

The India super-organism continued to evolve itself and add devices to enhance its network. Three months after the first day of the attack, it was a superintelligence millions of times more intelligent than an uninfected human. It now completely ignored the human uninfected survivors.

These survivors began to feel massive earthquakes that nearly continuously shook the planet. Around a year in, they gazed up in awe as a massive space elevator came online and started shuttling billions of tons of materials from the core of the planet to the interstellar shipyard past the moon. A couple of weeks later, the atmosphere of the planet collapsed, killing all uninfected and uninfected survivors. The India super-organism was not affected as it had long since moved onto computronium the size of islands.

The interstellar shipyard spent the next few millenia harvested the solar system and launching billions of titanic interstellar cargo ships to seek life in other solar systems.

Laurel is having a minor surgery today in Encino, so I drove her up to the clinic and am waiting in the cafe next door for her. The front desk secretary is supposed to call me when she is in the recovery room and I will go in and talk to her until she is coherent enough to go home. She had a similar procedure last month, and when she came out of anesthesia she was very cute. “What time is it? I feel funny. Did you like your tea? How long was I under? I feel funny. What time is it? Have I asked these questions before?”

I am hoping everything goes smoothly again. I told her if she becomes a vegetable, I’ll have to pull the plug. She wasn’t too happy about that.